When I first started this blog I thought I would be writing a lot of technical posts about programming and computing in general but that just hasn’t happened. I think that’s mainly due to the big divide I create between work and home. When I’m home I try (fairly successfully) to forget all about work. I don’t do much programming outside of work these days so when it comes to blogging all the programming thoughts are at the back of my mind. I do engage in computing of the family-tech-support variety, so finally here’s a post dedicated to the subject.
First the fluffy stuff. Lots of people are still stuck with using Windows XP and the default Luna theme looks like it was purchased from an Early Learning Centre. Try finding and installing the Energy Blue theme instead. It’s a lot more restful and manages to calm down the Pimp My Word Doc stylings of Office 2003 to the point where I don’t want to throw up.
My in-laws have just brought a new Lenovo 3000 C200 laptop, which features Windows Vista. Unfortunately it came with so much crap loaded that it ran like a total dog. Rather than try to tame Vista with a meagre half gig of ram or run for cover by installing XP, I decided to give Ubuntu a try.
Everything worked perfectly out of the box apart from the wireless and sound; I never have had much luck with other people’s hardware and Linux. Anyway, a few minutes googling later I came across the solution: For wireless follow these instructions and for sound follow these instructions. Don’t worry if it looks a bit complicated, just enter the commands listed and in 10 minutes everything will be working. This means you can have an operational laptop in around an hour, plus the performance doesn’t suck. Result!
Hopefully future versions of Ubuntu will have these issues resolved and the install or upgrade will be made even easier. If you have a laptop and need help with Ubuntu then I can thoroughly recommend looking for your model on the Laptop Testing Team’s page.
If you’d like to try Ubuntu then one very safe option is Wubi. This is a piece of very clever software that allows you to install a whole other operating system, namely Ubuntu, onto your Windows hard drive without doing anything remotely dangerous or scary sounding like “repartitioning”. When you’re done you can just uninstall like any other Windows application. Amazing!